Main menu

Dale Earnhardt Jr. takes NASCAR Showdown with wire-to-wire win

May 18, 2012

Dale Earnhardt Jr. started first and never relinquished the lead in North Carolina on Saturday during the Sprint Showdown. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

The driver who started first stayed there and easily won Saturday night's Sprint Showdown at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The pole-winning driver, who started dead last, rallied to finish second with a late-race pass that got him into NASCAR's Sprint All-Star Race.

Respectively, they were Dale Earnhardt Jr. and A.J. Allmendinger.

Earnhardt Jr. took the lead on the green flag and led all 40 laps of the Showdown to advance to the feature race. Allmendinger, the pole winner who had a left front flat on the parade lap, pitted as the rest of the field took the green. He stayed near the rear of the field until shortly after the 20-lap halftime break.

But he took four tires at the break--one of only a handful of drivers to give up track position for service--and relentlessly charged toward the front. He caught second-running Jamie McMurray with eight laps remaining but couldn't make the inside pass for second until the middle of the backstretch on the next-to-last lap.

“I got aero tight when I got up behind him,” Allmendinger said of McMurray. “The guys did a good job to give me left sides without getting lapped, and then I had a fast enough car to get there after the break. I wasn't going to let this team down. I was going to die trying; I was going to do whatever it took to win or finish second. I felt good the first five or six laps after stopping because I could tell how good the car was.”

“Tonight, you had to go right out of the gate, so the crew gave me a really good car,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “You don't have enough time in a race like this stuff come to you; you have to go hard from the start. We didn't bring our best bullet last year, didn't pay much attention to this race. But we worked really hard this year and I feel fortunate to have raced my way into it. I glad I didn't need the fan vote because you can't take that for granted.”